Night Dolls With Hairspray

On Air

Hypnogogic pop maven explores his mysterious, hyper-referential 1980s sound on a new album and a recent vinyl reissue.

Two years ago, David Keenan of The Wire coined the name "hypnagogic pop" for a strain of lo-fi, 1980s-centric psychedelia, or "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." Though Ariel Pink's AM-radio concoctions made him a godfather, Keenan placed James Ferraro-- previously known as part of the noise duo Skaters-- at the center of this "movement." In Keenan's article, Ferraro's first quote went like this: "I've always viewed my music as just sort of plugging into a matrix of human-alien culture, through plugging into a world broadcast of media entities that jump out of the screen and merge with life via people internalizing them as soundtracks for life temples."

Ferraro's music can be as confusing as that rambling proclamation. Yet there's a weird, hermetic kind of logic to both. Whatever a "life temple" might be, you can imagine it when you hear his mysterious, hyper-referential sound. He relies on samples, loops, and the textures and aura of 80s pop-- the kind heard on worn-out VHS tapes and glitchy video games. And he turns cheesy clichés-- preset keyboard melodies, phasey riffs, falsetto choruses-- into something hypnotic and almost cyber-spiritual, like a photocopy blurred by generations of reproduction until it becomes a Magic Eye painting.

Often, this approach can produce remarkably catchy music. Night Dolls with Hairspray in particular is filled with hooky gems. Its plunging bass lines, warped guitar riffs, and crooning vocals bounce around the stereo space like lasers in a hall of mirrors. Listening feels like peeking into the mind of a pop-culture-addled 80s teen-- an effect enhanced by lyrics about adolescent concerns sung in a pre-pubescent whine. Hissy, muffled, and oddly funny, Night Dolls can get pretty dizzying. Some might even find its sheen nauseating, much the way audiences left The Blair Witch Project more sick from the shaky camerawork than scared by the plot. But for anyone enchanted by Ariel Pink, there's lots to love in Ferraro's murky pop.

Just don't wait around for him to tone it down. More often, in the massive discography he's built, he turns the queasiness up to 11. In the resulting swamps of noise, ghosts of pop songs, movie soundtracks, TV ads, and other fleeting ephemera stew and rumble, but never quite break through the stubborn surface of his dense mix. That's the mode that Ferraro is in on On Air, first issued as a limited CD-R on Olde English Spelling Bee and recently pressed onto vinyl by Underwater Peoples. Here, he seems to man a black-hole radio station, mixing in surreal announcements and static-laden transitions. Snippets of melody and blasts of noise slam into each other, with single tracks often containing four or five chunks of what could be songs on their own. Maybe Ferraro's own trippy titles explain it best: "Electrocuted Hair", "New Waver From Hawaii Saturn", "Virtual Sumo Bubble Gum", "Cyber Shock Headtroplolis". Those could all be the names of Boredoms outtakes, and On Air's arty mess recalls that group as well as Yamantaka Eye's even nuttier Hanatarash.

Much the way that listening to a lot of Boredoms can alter your perception of what music is and how it works, making it through On Air is a bit of a brain-altering experience. By the end of it, you might understand Ferraro's Wire quote a little better, whether or not you can explain why. Plugging in, jumping out, merging with life-- on paper they sound like discarded New Age platitudes, but in the hands of James Ferraro, those ideas regain the electric charge of epiphany.